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Ubuntu To Turn Into A Rolling-Release Distribution?

Phoronix: Ubuntu To Turn Into A Rolling-Release Distribution?

There's been a lot of Ubuntu announcements coming down the pipe lately from ditching the GNOME Shell in favor of their own Canonical-developed Unity desktop to eventually shipping with the Wayland Display Server instead of X.Org. Here's another interesting one: Ubuntu may become a rolling-release distribution...

There's been a lot of Ubuntu announcements coming down the pipe lately from ditching the GNOME Shell in favor of their own Canonical-developed Unity desktop to eventually shipping with the Wayland Display Server instead of X.Org. Here's another interesting one: Ubuntu may become a rolling-release distribution...

For some users this would be great. I know myself, for my desktop computer, I would love this. Not so much for my server though, but I would assume Ubuntu will still have the regular LTS release every two years.

This is a great idea! The system core might be kept in a locked version, but for most user-visible apps there's no problem in having the latest version also available.

Why should I wait months to get a new version of my IM client, or my music player?

You can already kind-of get this with the openSUSE build service, but that's pretty unsupported and you have to tread carefully. (I run various openSUSE versions, but all have latest KDE and Firefox, for example.)

If this were to really happen I'd pull a McDonald's: I'd be loving it.
It annoys me to no end to have to reinstall every 6 months if I want to update. In fact, I've been thinking about moving away from Kubuntu (for a KDE4-based rolling distro) because of the reinstalling.
And yes I'm aware that strictly speaking, there is support for a nice ol' sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude full-upgrade but I've seen it go wrong too many times on Kubuntu to trust that process for updating to a new Kubuntu release.

This would be a good thing. If they did this and it proved to better meet the fine line between cutting-edge/stability, I would definitely consider switching back to Ubuntu on at least 1 or 2 of my machines.

Why should I wait months to get a new version of my IM client, or my music player?

That depends. A new version of Amarok might require an updated KDE, which can cause tons of issues.

I don't know if this is a good thing for Ubuntu, since if they're aiming to be easy to use then I think this is a step backwards. Users will have to deal with all kinds of issues, and not just bugs in newer packages. In Gentoo sometimes libraries just break, so your application won't run because it can't find the library and you have to run revdep-rebuild once in a while.

I use Gentoo, so I love rolling release, but I don't think it's the right way to go for most people.

As someone who maintains PPA's, this is much appreciated and can't come soon enough. I don't think I'll stop using aptosid as my main distro, but I may start using Ubuntu for more than packaging purposes again.